V S Achuthanandan is a stickler for ideological rigidity but he couldn’t care less about party discipline. The CPM was forced to take disciplinary action against its founder leader on many occasions.
Achuthanandan faced the first disciplinary action within two years of the formation of the party in 1964. Branded as a Chinese stooge, he was jailed along with other communist leaders in the backdrop of the war with China. Achuthanadan, a member of the central committee and the state secretariat, mooted a plan to donate blood for the Indian soldiers and contribute to the national security fund. The initiative did not go well in the party, which expelled Achuthanandan from the state secretariat in December 1966.
He was formally accused of drawing up and circulating anti-party documents from the jail in Thiruvananthapuram.
In 1988, Achuthanandan was warned by the politburo when he was the state secretary. He was accused of standing in the way of the then Left Democratic Front government by supporting the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad’s campaign against hydel power and nuclear energy.
By 1998, Achuthanandan had succeeded in creating a vertical rift within the party. The politburo censured the veteran, along with E Balanandan and M A Baby, for the factional activities in the run up to the party’s state conference at Palakkad.
Controversies followed Achuthanandan even after he was sworn in chief minister. The CPM publicly censured its chief minister in 2007 for criticizing the functioning of fellow ministers T M Thomas Isaac and Paloli Muhammed Kutty in relation to a loan from the Asia Development Bank.
Later that year, he was suspended from the politburo along with state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan for their bitter fight for the control of the party. The two top comrades were on a public slanging match.
Achuthanandan, however, refused to budge. His public spat with Vijayan forced the party to show him the door from the politburo in 2009.
In 2011, he was censured again for writing a letter to the prime minister on the sale of lotteries from other states in Kerala, in a move seen as against finance minister Isaac and the party state unit.
Achuthanandan put the party in a spot when he suggested that the state leadership had a role to play in the sensational murder of dissident leader T P Chandrasekharan. The CPM publicly censured the opposition leader in July 2012.
Just three months down the line, Achuthanandan rubbed the party leadership the wrong way when he offered his support to a movement against a nuclear plant at Koodamkulam in Tamil Nadu. He objected to all nuclear plants, in contrast to the party line that gave an exemption to the Koodamkulam plant because the reactors was bought from Russia before the UPA government signed the nuclear deal with the United States. He was publicly censured.
Achuthanandan was censured again in October 2013 for his statements contradicting the party line on the SNC-Lavalin case and the previous assembly election. The leader went to the extent of saying that he trusted the Comptroller and Auditor General of India rather than his own party. He had also suggested that the party choose to lose an election than letting him the chief minister for one more term.
The CPM central committee censured Achuthanandan in January 2017 for his recurring breach of party discipline. He was accused of violating the organizational principles of the party.
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